Adios: ESPN Radio taking leave of San Diego

The station’s Mexico-based owners, who probably set some kind of radio record for lack of promotion during most of the past eight years, notified ESPN this week that the station would drop the all-ESPN format effective at the end of August.

I know, most of you rarely paid attention to the station — except when you really needed it, like during baseball’s postseason and when the BCS bowl games were being played.

That means ESPN doesn’t have much time to find a replacement.

“We’re looking,” said ESPN spokesman Dan Quinn, adding that the Worldwide Leader hopes to persuade management at 98.9 to keep ESPN programming on the air until a new home can be found.

One thing is for certain: Even though ESPN Radio 98.9 (and ESPN Radio 800 before it) carried nearly all of ESPN’s programming, the network would prefer its affiliate in the nation’s 17th-largest radio market have a couple of local shows to provide a presence in the community.

The two most obvious places for ESPN to look are the two other all-sports stations in San Diego — XX Sports 1090 and XTRA Sports 1360. But both have big issues.

At XX 1090, there is local weekday programming, either talk shows or Padres, from 5 a.m. until 10 p.m. pretty much year-round, with the exception of the three morning hours ruled by Jim Rome. That doesn’t leave much time for ESPN programming to air — just overnights and weekends, when XX 1090 currently airs the Sporting News Network. But the play-by-play that ESPN provides would be valuable to XX 1090.

“You’ve got to look at everything,” said Jack Evans, vice president of programming for LMA/BCA Broadcasting, which owns XX 1090 plus five other local stations. One of those stations, San Diego 1700-AM, would seem to be a potential home for round-the-clock ESPN or ESPN Deportes programming. (The latter is on 800-AM, a sister station to ESPN Radio 98.9.)

The problem at XTRA Sports 1360 is more complex. That station carries just seven hours of local programming — which will expand to 10 starting Monday when Ben Higgins of KGTV Channel 10 begins hosting a show from noon to 3 p.m. — but it is owned by Clear Channel Communications, which also owns Premiere Radio Networks, which has an agreement with Fox Sports Radio. Would a Clear Channel station really be allowed to dump Fox programming to pick up the “enemy?”

“I’m constantly curious on how I can make us better,” program director Brian Wilson said. “We’ll take everything into consideration.”

Some things are decided at higher levels, though, which makes XTRA 1360 a decisive long shot in this situation.

As for the departing ESPN Radio 98.9, which for most of its existence was ESPN Radio 800, I’ll remember it this way: It always should have been better than it was.

It was going to have a stronger signal, which finally happened, although you would have had a hard time proving it in North County. Then the station was going to have a local show, which finally happened in September 2004, except it treated hosts Dave Palet and Jeff Dotseth so poorly that they left after a year. They were never replaced, perhaps because they had done the show from the den of Palet’s home and the host wasn’t likely to allow a replacement similar access.